Bethel budget may split in two

News-Times, The (Danbury, CT), Marietta Homayonpour THE NEWS-TIMES

Published 1:00 am, Wednesday, June 14, 2006

BETHEL - An old rock n' roll song laments that breaking up is hard to do.

The newly formed
Charter Revision Commission
is getting ready to deliberate another kind of split and will likely find that kind of breaking up can be just as tough.
Thursday night the Charter Revision Commission established last month by the
Board of Selectmen
will meet for the first time. One of its major considerations will be whether to split the annual budget into its municipal and school components.
Presently, Bethel residents vote on one budget amount.
Some town and school officials, as well as political action groups, say splitting the budget will give better direction to the

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Board of Finance
. Others say breaking up the budget will cause more divisiveness in town, especially between those who traditionally support a school budget and those who oppose it.
The meeting begins at 7:30 p.m. in the municipal center on School Street, where the seven commission members will choose officers and set a public hearing date to get input from residents on charter revisions. Before any changes are made to the town's charter, residents would have to approve the commission's recommendations in a referendum.
Bethel is not the only town in the area where splitting the budget will soon be a topic. Brookfield and Newtown - which also vote on one budget number - have authorized charter revision commissions.
Newtown First Selectman Herb Rosenthal is undecided about whether the budget should be split. "There's pros and cons," he said.
On the one hand Rosenthal said he would "hate to see the town divided into us and them," especially since the municipal side of the budget doesn't have the kind of support groups that the school side does.
On the other hand, a split budget "makes it a little clearer where to go" if one side is defeated.
In New Fairfield, however, where the budget was split into two amounts several years ago,
First Selectman John Hodge
said he likes the system. "It gives the Board of Finance better direction as to where to cut if a budget is defeated."
Hodge also said that split budgets don't inflame divisiveness. If there's tension between groups over a budget, he said, the tension already exists. A split budget "doesn't create it."
In Bethel,
First Selectman Bob Burke
said splitting the budget "gives taxpayers better control on how they want their money spent."
The
Bethel school board
has not discussed whether to take a position on splitting the budget, but chairman
Stuart Carlsen
said, "Personally, I feel two budgets would be a good idea, because it would guide the board of finance more accurately."
But another school board member,
Matt Knickerbocker
, called splitting the budget "one of the worst ideas I've heard of in town government."
Knickerbocker, a former school board chairman, said such a move "would cause more divisiveness" and that finance board members "know what taxpayers are thinking" by listening to them at public hearings.
The taxpayer watchdog group
Bethel Action Committee
, supports splitting the budget because "voters deserve as many choices as possible," said the group's chairman,
Matt Paulsen
.
But
Kim Lemone
, treasurer of the political action committee Support Our Schools, is against splitting the vote. "We're one community, we're one town," she said. "There should be one vote."
One member of the recently appointed Charter Revision Commission, Pro Bethel party head
Bob Crnic
, has long been a supporter of splitting the budget. Such a move could create "a divisive situation," he said, "but we already operate in a divisive situation."
He stressed that by splitting the vote, "the town gets a good indication of what to cut" if one of the budgets is defeated.